EnergyPreserver

Lifeboat Foundation EnergyPreserver

By the Lifeboat Foundation Scientific Advisory Board.
This is an ongoing program so you may submit suggestions to [email protected].

Overview

If our civilization ran out of energy, it would grind to a halt, so
Lifeboat Foundation is looking for solutions.

Imagine providing the Earth or a moon base with harnessed solar
power,
or ravelling in space without returning to Earth for fuel. That’s the
idea behind space-based solar power generators such as this SunTower.
Courtesy, NASA.

Solar Power from Space

“We need new sources of electrical power”, said John Mankins, Manager
of Advanced Concepts Studies at NASA Headquarters Office of Space
Flight, “and we have been studying a variety of space solar power
concepts. Tremendous advances have been made in many relevant
technologies in the last fifteen years.”

NASA’s involvement in space solar power, or SSP for short, began after
the oil embargo of the mid-1970’s when the space agency (working under
the leadership of the US Department of Energy) began to study
alternative energy sources that might result in less dependence on
foreign oil.

Proposed space solar power systems utilize well-known physical
principles  namely, the conversion of sunlight to electricity by
means of photovoltaic cells. Giant structures consisting of row after
row of photovoltaic (PV) arrays could be placed either in a
geostationary Earth orbit or on the Moon. A complete system would
collect solar energy in space, convert it to microwaves, and transmit
the microwave radiation to Earth where it would be captured by a ground
antenna and transformed to usable electricity.